UPDATE, AUG 6 5:05 P.M.: As the funeral for Joel Acevedo took place earlier this morning at St. Boniface Church in Anaheim, La Cucaracha cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz made good on his t-shirt fundraising goal. Reaching over a thousand dollars in one week's time, he donated $500 to the Acevedo Memorial Fund and gave the other $500 to Geneveive Huizar, the mother of Manuel Diaz.

The APD lampooning shirts are still available on Pocho.com and additional proceeds may go to help the efforts of the Anaheim Cruzaders, but time is running out.

"I will close the Paypal link sometime next week in case as shirt sales are leveling off," the cartoonist wrote to his followers on Facebook. "I will also have some extra shirts on hand to sell at LunaSol in Uptown Whittier in case anyone's interested."

ORIGINAL POST, AUG 1, 12:04 P.M.: In an independent effort, ingenious cartoonistaLalo Alcaraz is lending his talents to help out the families of Manuel Diaz and Joel Acevedo, two young men fatally shot to death in back-to-back killings by police in Anaheim late last month.

All of the social unrest in the city since then has not gone unnoticed by the politically provocative artist who has already illustrated the Tragic Kingdom for last week's newsprint edition of the Weekly.

With the funeral costs of the families in mind, Alcaraz's is donating his latest image excoriating the Anaheim Police Department in order to raise funds in the form of t-shirts for sale. "Everybody is drawing the Mickey ears and I just thought skull and bones was perfect for this," he says of his Punisher meets Mickey Mouse drawing. "Only I said I'm not going to do bones, I'm going to do shotguns."

After the artist posted the finished product to his Facebook page, the positive response was immediate with people asking if it was going to be made into a shirt. Keeping pace with the reports of this infernal rag, the impetus for that became stronger when Alcaraz read about the police presence outside the fundraising car wash for Diaz.

Pocho.com

Before going forward with the plan, though, the collective decision by all involved was to simply donate the money to existing memorial funds. "I thought we should keep it independent of the families because the image is so harsh," he says.

With The Roots Factory in San Diego ready to give their labor freely in printing them up, the effort went live yesterday on Alcaraz's ñews y satire Pocho.com website where he also issued a statement which includes information on how people can help even if they don't want the shirt. "We almost at $500 right now and it hasn't even been 24 hours," he adds. "The two important things are that people are angry and they want to help. These shirts are a way to express that."

Priced at $25 each, proceeds from sales of each shirt will be evenly donated between the families of Acevedo and Diaz with only $5 per item going to cover production costs. "I just want to help these people," Alcaraz says. "I want to help the families who are suffering."